Climate, vaccines, and human psychology: the public vs. science

How can we do better at communicating controversial topics like climate change …

Last week, Ars and Nature.com partnered to present the first Science Online NYC meeting, held at the Rockefeller University campus. The night focused on communicating controversial scientific topics, with an emphasis on vaccines and climate change. Although the general conclusion was that psychology and history dictate that there's only so much we can do to engage the public on some topics, there are simple ways scientists can do better.

David Ropeik, a journalist turned lecturer and consultant, started off by describing why the public doesn't always come to terms with science. The first point he mentioned is that all of us, even experts, never have a complete picture of a complex topic—he termed the situation "bounded rationality," where we try to make reasonable extrapolations from the information we do have. He also pointed to the work of Dan Kahan, which has indicated that we accept or reject information in a way that reinforces our identity as part of a social group. If you think your peers don't like evolution, for example, you're more likely to reject information that supports it.

Ken Bromberg, who is the head of pediatrics at Brooklyn Hospital, spoke for a bit about vaccine safety. There's a tendency to think that resistance to vaccination arises from the fact that the diseases they prevent are now extremely rare, but Bromberg noted that antivaccination movements have been around since the beginning of vaccination programs, in some cases at times where the diseases still posed a real threat. And the cultural contexts involved in those movements have been very different throughout history, and are very different currently. The resistance to vaccination in Brooklyn, for example, is different culturally from that on the West Coast, so a single message can't be expected to be effective.

NASA's Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher, rounded out the panel, and focused a bit on what scientists might do better. He said that, prior to the politicization of the issue, climate science was a field nobody cared about, and involved poking through deep sea muck or fossilized rodent pee in order to gain a clearer picture of past climates. The scientists themselves were unprepared for the aggressive attention their field received, and have responded in a variety of ways, many of them ineffective.

The approach he finds most effective is to focus on the process of science: not just what we know about the climate, but how we've come to know it, and how we've eliminated alternative explanations. The process of science tends to be something that almost everyone, even climate science's harshest critics, admires. By discussing the process of climatology, Schmidt thought that more people would be willing to recognize that it's the same process that operates in other fields.

The discussion with the audience went on for nearly an hour after these presentations wrapped up, and covered a lot more ground. If the topic interests you, it's well worth watching the archived video of the discussion.